Debts, trusts, and an offshore shield: how the daughter of former banker Mikhail Shishkhanov, through a front lawyer, hid a London mansion from creditors and sanctions

Debts, trusts, and an offshore shield: how the daughter of former banker Mikhail Shishkhanov, through a front lawyer, hid a London mansion from creditors and sanctions

It has become known that Nicole Shishkhanova, the daughter of former banker Mikail Shishkhanov (nephew of oligarch Mikhail Gutseriev), although she has lived in the US for a long time, is involved in the family business. She was a director of the Cypriot offshore company PARKFENCE HOLDINGS LIMITED. The offshore company owns real estate in London worth tens of millions of pounds sterling.

Since 2022, a new law has been in effect in the United Kingdom, requiring all legal entities that own real estate in the country to register as foreign companies in the local register and disclose their ultimate beneficial owners. PARKFENCE HOLDINGS LIMITED complied with this condition and registered in 2024, but did not disclose the real beneficiaries (the Shishkhanov-Gutseriev family), finding a loophole in the legislation: the company was recorded as owned by trusts, and the nominal owner and manager of the company became the architect of this scheme, renowned American lawyer Neil Schoenblum. He is an expert in trust law, president and co-founder of Preservation Trust Company, Inc., a boutique trust company in Nevada that provides special services to wealthy clients.

At the same time, PARKFENCE is still run by the same managers who work for other Shishkhanov-Gutseriev companies. Currently, the directors of the Cypriot PARKFENCE are Natalia Isaikina and Youssef Ekhideh, who manages dozens of other companies linked to Shishkhanov – for example, RUSGRAIN HOLDING, which, through “Rost Investments,” was part of Shishkhanov’s ROST-Bank. Isaikina is a Cypriot citizen; she was also a director of the London company NIKA HOLDINGS LTD, where her colleague was Maxim Kalyuzhny, a British citizen and a member of the board of directors of PJSC M.Video (part of the Gutseriev “Safmar” group).

The beneficiary of NIKA HOLDINGS LTD was Svetlana Kulazhenko, wife of Mikhail Shishkhanov, who really likes London and even opened a restaurant there in 2018, Babel House – it belonged to the same company NIKA, though at that time it was called Babel London Limited. It is known that Svetlana’s business partner was a certain Vadim. The restaurant is now closed, and the domain name of its website is for sale.

NIKA HOLDINGS LTD was liquidated in February 2024, leaving creditors with debts of about £2 million. The subsidiary GREEN’S GRILL & RESTAURANT LIMITED (beneficiary – Svetlana Kulazhenko, a 79-year-old Ukrainian citizen) went through bankruptcy proceedings due to debts of £8 million and was also closed.

Liquidating the Cypriot PARKFENCE was impossible: the offshore company holds significant assets – shares and a 946 sq m mansion in the elite London district at 68 Mount Street. According to public data from British aggregators, the house was purchased in 2019 for £26 million. In December 2019, a large loan was secured against this property, issued to PARKFENCE by Vadim Moshkovich, founder of the Rusagro holding and former senator from the Belgorod region. The money was lent for 5 years at 3.5% per annum, with the condition of regular interest payments to Moshkovich.

In March 2022, Moshkovich came under sanctions, and Shishkhanov’s offshore stopped paying the loan. It then turned out that back in January, Moshkovich had assigned the debt claim rights to his own sister, Yulia Tribunskaya, and she even paid Moshkovich for it in July 2022 in several installments. The fact of the kinship between Tribunskaya and Moshkovich was confirmed by Moscow courts, which recognized the loan agreement assignment as legal – under the terms of which Moshkovich could only transfer the debt to a close relative: wife, children, sisters, or brothers. In early 2024, courts recognized Tribunskaya’s claim against PARKFENCE for debt repayment as legitimate. Given the dismal state of the Shishkhanovs’ London assets, Tribunskaya could well take the mansion to preserve it for her brother.

Moshkovich, as is known, has been under arrest for over a year as a defendant in a case of particularly large-scale fraud, and a London mansion worth £26 million is better not to be exposed in such a case.